THE HOPPER POETRY PRIZE

AUGUST 2019

We are pleased to announce that David Axelrod is runner-up for The Hopper Poetry Prize for his manuscript Cold Mornings of the Northern Spring.

Like the composer Haydn whose “mind [was] poised / at the verge of a new, more / helpful era / aspired to, but never reached,” the narrator of these poems at once celebrates and laments the loss of the “elsewhere long ago,” a place of “bounty,” the “ripening greens” near Glacier Peak, the headwaters of five rivers. Typically silent, like the sorrow monkey in the collection’s epigraph, the poet on the verge of a “diminishing range” turns to “words / old as aggregate memory . . . to “[find a] haven every night” before a vision of the “future . . . drilled in privation.” The language is dense, lush with familiarities: “devil’s strip,” “the bitterroot foothills,” the “first cuttings of alfalfa, musky buckbrush leaves.” Like the title of one of the poems, the journey through this “otherworld” is a “Song of Extinctions,” a catalogue of “What befell [these places],” what “isn’t over, much less forgiven.” As the poet guides us in our “feckless shambles” to the scenes of “dispossession”—“the abandoned smelter / scheduled for demolition,” the “forest becom[ing] a crop”—the tone is reverent, the tension palpable. It is in this tension that we feel a homesickness for “God’s failing project on earth.”

—Kathleen Hellen, author of Umberto’s Night

David Axelrod’s eighth collection of poems, The Open Hand, appeared recently from Lost Horse Press. His second collection of nonfiction, The Eclipse I Call Father: Essays on Absence is forthcoming from Oregon State University Press in the spring of 2019. Axelrod wrote the introduction, “My Interests Are People,” for About People: Photographs by Gert Berliner, which appeared in the summer of 2018 from Arts End Books. Axelrod directs the low residency MFA and Wilderness, Ecology, and Community program at Eastern Oregon University. In addition, he edits basalt: a journal of fine & literary arts, and serves on the editorial board of Lynx House Press. Enjoy a poem from Cold Mornings of the Northern Spring below.